


between the salt water and the sea strands

by LocketShoru



Series: in kismet marcescence [6]
Category: Saint Seiya, 聖闘士星矢: 冥王神話 | Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Minos' POV, emotional tension, pandora is barely there tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:13:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24648520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoru
Summary: Minos awakens to a puzzle of an answer to a question he refuses to admit he asked. The answer is imperative. What Albafica means by it, even more so.
Relationships: Griffon Minos/Pisces Albafica
Series: in kismet marcescence [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1645942
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	between the salt water and the sea strands

**Author's Note:**

> I know this took Ages but here we are. I hope it makes sense, though you aren't getting context anytime soon! :D

And at what point did he begin to love the sea again? Some mornings he still woke up screaming, sure of something that wasn't there anymore, still coughing out the salt that hadn't stung his throat for millennia. He'd vowed never to love the sea again, as long as he chanced to live his every life, until that bittersweet day when they stood glorious on the battlefield at last.

All he'd ever wanted was the glory, really. He didn't choose to do what was right, because one never chooses such things. He followed the sea and the stars and screamed the lightning home. Never did a storm pass over his kingdom without his will, and here he was, and there he needed to be; channeling the storm like a rod of copper and orichalcum.

At some point, he'd lost his humanity, cut it one bleeding shard and one lifetime out until he didn't remember anything but the lightning, anything but the theatre. Until the world was brought down to metal on metal, and breaking, and starlight air shattering around him, until all he could have been was older, and wilder, than he had any right to be. He wondered if the world saw history's shadows within his eyes.

Sometimes, he was sure he might wake up one misty morning and be glad for it, be true and glad and laughing with a notable lack of seasalt clinging to his throat. And he would rise, sure as the tsunami, sure as the storm, and if he flew, it might yet be worth it to love the sea again, as he soared past it and never forgot who he was meant to be. If he didn't drown on his own wings and bravery.

The words had been curled in a fine scrawl, the hand not unsteady but certainly unused to lyrics so fancy. The slice of the sea that still remembered what it was to drown an unrepentant king wasn't skilled with the spoken vowel, and it was hard to say he was much better with the written version. And yet.

And yet he found himself a puzzle, the floorspace of part of the entry-hall cleared away to puzzle it all together. What his lover had made was as of yet unclear: he had arisen against the gray, unloving dawn to find a rosewood box, and under the seven locks were fragments of parchment, tied together with a scrap of sweet red fabric and a single, pale lavender rose. If he were to be presumptuous, he might consider the rose the same hue of violet as his eyes.

The fragments of parchment, however. On each were two, maybe three, lines of what seemed like poetry, sometimes cut halfway through the words by the edge, five words across at the most. And of what was not cursive was perhaps some of the most beautiful watercolours he had ever lain eyes upon, in this life or any other. He laid them all out, one by one, against the warm, polished wooden floor. Some inventions could only live on through death.

Minos brushed fingertips across a few of the fragments, jagged and not always square, flipping one back to the right side up. He had seen jigsaw puzzles before, but this... This was poetry in motion, energy worked into a spell wrought of love and sorrow. This was a code he was meant to solve, for broken apart it meant nothing at all.

Broken apart, away from the siren who was his everything, Minos was not sure if he were anything at all, himself. He breathed in, the soft scent of the roses and witchlight soothing his restless heart. And what of it? Fragments of roses and deep blues on the watercolour, layers of dark indigo against skylight blue, the deepest of the navies shot through with white, thin as cat-whiskers.

He wondered what the world intended on meaning.

"-n thousands of years, bre-

-ings to me, reaches for m-"

He studied the fragment, barely two inches across, cut with a knife in the middle of the words. His fingers slipped to another piece, sorting through the spread in front of him, and lifted another one, holding the two fragments beside each other. They didn't match. Their edges were cut so clearly with a knife, jagged and clean. Minos paused.

"And to whom does the s-

fall within the mist, let it bl-"

Yes, that had to be the corner edge of the original parchment sheet, the beginning of the poem. His lover had created the work and split it up, left it in pieces. Perhaps that was yet his heart: he was learning, he was learning. Minos saw no need for his own illusions, his own poetry, at the heart of the moment. This was his lover's dominion, to fill his mind with pretty words and sharper blades. He set the corner piece to where he thought it might go, sorting through for what else may be the edges.

Somewhat in the back of his mind, he noted Aiacos sneaking out of his temple, far too late to be up to anything reputable. Far be it from his responsibility to drag him home, after all; Minos was the wayward Judge. He was the one who ran from his own execution. He set a side fragment beside another, and to his surprise, their rough, jagged edges fit seamlessly together. He narrowed his eyes, just for a moment, and there...

Seasalt against his windowsill, like glitter, like the faintest touch of sunlight on the water. His cosmos rose to his surprise. He reached out, fingertips stretched, and brushed the cut between the two pieces. The glitter faded, and when he retracted his hand, they were one piece, sealed back together as if they had never been cut.

"In order to know your answer, I must mend your work," he whispered. His voice hung in the air just in front of his lips, solid and silken and in the quiet awe of an almost-prayer. "I must mend your heart."

He could almost feel himself fall, deeper into the darkness of his eyes, that dark midnight of his eyes, where stars would never be found, where he was charting his own path through a sea with nothing but a compass and a siren's song. Minos threw his head back and laughed, laughed. He was learning at last, he was wayfinding his path back home to the roses.

Nobody ever said the roses had to live forever, and death was a truer immortality.

"-ouqets of noble girls as

-ean of flowers that I

flesh decays an-"

He couldn't help but read what little of the poems the fragments could tell him on their own, his fingers sorting through with a frenzy he knew only of seeking, only of a journey, only of sorrow he screamed across the sweeping waves of the sea. If he swallowed back his tears, if he drowned in his misery, it wouldn't matter. He would mend it. He would mend what had been broken.

Two pieces, all fragments of flowers, painted a stained-glass window's worth of colours. He reached over and pushed them gently into piles, sorted by colour, adding sea pieces to a different pile and what he thought might be a star-glittered sky into another. His cosmos swirled around him, a silvery wisp of a thing, sealing what it could by chance and hoping he might call what had been broken back to its proper order.

A few moments passed and he was sure, he was sure, and he let the cracks seal themselves over in front of his eyes, solid and true, and became a glittering flower once more. He pressed it to a long strip of edge he had managed to put together, and held in his hand a chunk no bigger than his hand.

He ignored the mourning dove at the windowsill, watching him, humming her fallow song. She chirped in his direction, a birdsong of something sweet, something sorrowful. A song he'd taught her, long ago, when the world was old and he was young, and remembering what it felt like to die.

"I learned its ways, envied its pride; but needed nothing it had," he answered, not sparing her a glance. She still knew the song, and for a line of lyric he sang it back, eyes focused on the canvas in front of him. There were so many pieces… What would it become, when he was done? What would he be able to understand of it?

He had fled before he had his answer. It wasn't a decision of the moment, wasn't the executioner's axe falling upon his throat. And yet, and yet. It may as well have been, hours of agonizing patience, hours of knowing he was asking the world to change on his whim. The world rarely indulged him so blatantly. He reached for a fragment of rose, barely a curled capital letter discernible from the petals, and pressed it against the other half of the blossom. The flowers here were more than just roses.

He loved them, and he hated them, and he didn't understand how they could be so cruel. To his blood, to his heart, to remind the sea there was more than a wilderness beyond silken rags. He was drowning. He was drowning, and he breathed out, blew the seasalt from the puzzle to the carpet, ignoring how difficult it might be to remove later. Albafica had been here, graced this room with his presence. Not truly. He had never seen these walls, never walked this floor. But the seasalt witnessed it for him, before him, the hearth drawing it in and breathing out a scent of the storm.

He'd forgotten how much he could love the sea, how he had managed it in the first place. How the world would crumble before he forgot the waves on the high tide. A flicker of cosmos, approaching Ptolomea. The princess who brandished the axe and the cake and called herself a queen. If there were not secrets to be unravelled and understood, he might have laughed in her face, dared her chase after him to see if she could compare to the shadows of the crown. But ah. She had a habit of touching his possessions when she was not allowed to.

The rap upon the door rang out bitter and deep and imperative that he answer. He rose, casting a longing gaze at his unfinished work. He was near a quarter done, now, and already he wished to return to it.

He squared his shoulders, chin held high to look down upon she who dared bother him while he was off-duty. Albafica would not have been home, anyway. It was not as though he too, would have been gone. And he opened the door.

"Is there something you require, Lady?" he asked, and if his voice was graceful but blunt, well. She deserved it, for asking so late. Lady Pandora was dressed in a style not unlike a porcelain doll, her face just as flushed, her hair as inky black as the dark of a pool on a moonless night.

She folded her arms, tapping her foot against the marble step. "Let me in," she said. He glowered at her.

"No. Do you require anything else, Lady?" His tone was a tide against the rocky shore: unforgiving, relentless, losing, and one day winning the war. They had already been fighting this quiet battle for millennia. It would never be long enough.

She narrowed her eyes. "Aiacos is gone." She said it like it was a proclamation, some great truth he hadn't noticed a half-hour prior. Nothing left Cocytus and escaped his notice. If it did, he would already be drowning in a dangerous sea. He would already be drowned and dead, his bones rolled over on the tides. Some things were not meant to be.

"That is not my problem," he answered, firmly. "If he wanders upon the ground world, seeking spirit and solace, then may he wander where he will. Aiacos will not shirk his true duty, nor his loyalty to a Lord above either one of us. If that is all you wished to tell me, Lady, I would rather a page next time. I have work that is not getting done this way."

He closed the door before she could get another word in, and walked away, eyes back on the portrait the sea had painted and woven in his love. What he hoped might be his love. If indeed he found the answer he was hoping for.

Pandora remained on the marble steps yelling for another few moments, smacking her hand against the door. He all but tuned her out, half an ear listening for any important information but like a soul telling their entire life story to him, he didn't bother processing the majority of what she said. There was no need to. She would yell until she understood the battle was lost, and she would return home to Judecca, and do whatever it was she did to pass the hours of the day. He didn't much care – no, he cared very little indeed. The sea in front of him sang better to his ears.

He offered a sharp, four-tone whistle to the windowsill, eyes still on the fragments of parchment. The dove, his dove, offered a soft caw and flew to rest her claws on his shoulder. He was a natural falconer, after all the time he spent wrestling Aiacos into submission. The fact that he was the only bird with opposable thumbs didn't much change that fact.

"-ack at the endless sky, shooting st-

all I see is the blue, vio-

-el the kiss of yo-"

Was that a yes, in the triangle slice of lyrics? He could not be sure, not now, not with silver words in a curling scrawl over midnight's blue. Surety would mean only the rise of hope that may shatter across the cobblestone. Another slice caught his eye, its left edge straight against a blade. An edge piece, then- it slipped between his fingers and he held it up to the light, eyes narrowed, rotating it until the words hung left-to-right, and set it gently against the corner piece.

And so his work continued, a dove upon his shoulder, Pandora finally fleeing Ptolomea for something more worth her time. He rose from his place only once, to make a cup of tea. Albafica had sent him some with his last letter – had it truly been a fortnight and a half since he last had held his lover in his arms? – and he'd drunk it until he could say for sure the exact ingredients, the exact composition. He penned it down in a hidden, handmade notebook, noting the composition, the date of postage, and all the flowers and flavours meant.

The message had been clear: ' _I miss you, and I don't know when I can see you again_.' A part of it had broken his heart, piece by piece, slowly shredding his eyes under longing for the boy that had sung his heart to peace. He'd never said that purity had been involved, and truly, after their last quest into civilization together, he wasn't entirely certain it ever had been. But ah, the tea he chose was rosehips and amaranth and smoky cider, and he allowed the water to come to a boil before he allowed himself to pour it. The dove upon his shoulder chirped, and he laughed, reaching for a nut from the hanging bowl above his sink to feed to her. She took it gratefully and rubbed her head against his temple, and he leaned into the gesture. Some things went past species, and if he told her a secret, she wouldn't tell Aiacos. Some messages were only for those who deserved them.

"Do I love him, enough to write the recipe for my heart against parchment and offer it to him in repentance?" he asked, musing aloud to the bird that kept him company. "Ah, I already have. There isn't a point to question what has already been done, what has already happened."

The water had simmered to begin bubbling, and he reached to take it off the fire, pouring it into the mug. He didn't bother with a tea bag, he never did – if anything, he could use the divination as he unravelled the secrets of the sea.

The recipe for the scones was entirely his own: he had stood in Albafica's kitchen within the twelfth temple and shown him how to make them, how to allow them to cook without burning them, how to whip the cream into something a little more solid. The jam was more difficult, but they had invented a recipe together that they both had enjoyed, roses and honeysuckle and strawberry, although he'd added raspberries too for a thicker consistency.

He spread the cream and jam across the scones, carrying his tea and scones back to the mystery of the answer he so yearned to hear. He would be a fool, if he had been too forward, if he had been wrong. The turning point of their story was up ahead, almost within reach, and he still did not know the direction of their travel. He might never know it, if he were wrong, if he couldn't unravel the mystery. Perhaps he too were unravelling.

He ate the scones with his eyes on the mystery, roses and forget-me-not against clover and a backdrop of the sea. If he were not wrong – those were shooting stars, weren't they? His memory flickered back, to the reality he had created on the wild of him alone, how he had dragged another in with him. Another who his curiosity mired him to, who he wished had never been caught up in a militia that would never stop sounding the clarion. But ah, that would be a different sea entirely, even if the waters were the same.

He pushed two more fragments together, watching how they sealed into one, leaving nothing but a trace of seasalt behind. It glittered with something a little more, a colour that had not been there before. He set down his tea, and reached for the seasalt.

He blew it off his fingertips, divining by wind, scattering it across the remnants of a message, watching where it fell. Every piece that a grain of seasalt landed on, he lifted, and surely enough. He set each one into place, watching them connect together, offering him a little more seasalt. And he reached for that, too, scattering it across his floor, and began to work.

He had half a mug of cold tea, a floor positively covered in salt, and one last fragment of parchment. He had forced himself to stop reading the fragments as he went through, focusing on the seasalt, attempting to savour the surprise. It was almost agony, thorns slipping between his ribs and the vertebrae of his spine. He breathed out, and set it down into place, allowing it to seal over.

The canvas was whole, almost seven feet square. It glittered for a moment, and the parchment shifted to silk under his fingertips. A trick of alchemy he hadn't known that his lover knew how to cast. Staring at the scene, the lyrics sewn in with embroidery that hadn't been any more than ink a moment ago, the roses carefully stained in, the shooting stars woven silver thread.

Albafica's answer had come in the form of a tapestry. He deserved the answer only if he put in the effort to unravel his secrets and make him whole. A whole poem, the sea at low tide.

"And to whom does the sky hark and hear, heed and hold?" he whispered, his voice in reverence, a prayer with every syllable that he might find the answer he truly wished to hear. "The mist of unshed tears hides away the truest secrets of them all. I hold your offering close to my heart and I fall within the mist, let it blanket me, let it envelop me in something more than sorrow for my existence. I may well not exist, and I may well be the only thing that exists, as the earth below my bare feet becomes to me like family, and I fall. There is lightning in the sky above me, and mist that holds me here, holds me close, caught in a glimpse of the storm, a glimpse of the sunset."

Roses and Celtic knots curled around the edges. The sky was a true midnight, shot through with shooting stars, shot through with lightning. The grass was lavender, the cliff's edge bone-white against the deep waters. "No one has walked here in thousands of years, breathed this heather-sweet air, loved the mooring so swiftly and strongly as I do. There is a silence here, and if I were to leave, I will not have broken it. The mist clings to me, reaches for my hair, my hand to hold, my throat to kiss. I step forward, again and again, and descend into the lavender dream. It is but a dream, a sweet one, one where I may wake and wonder why. The lightning crackles over my head, the moon above me new and sleeping, and I begin to run."

He blinked away the glassy reminder of his own emotions. He would not shed tears leaning over something so beautiful. "For you I begin to run, begin to laugh, throw my head back at the endless sky. The endless sky, shooting stars and lightning in that blue, blue heaven, where there isn't so much as a drop of red. How tired I am of the red, how wondrous all I see is the blue, violet and green."

It took everything he had not to begin to laugh. Was it true, was the answer all he'd hoped for? Was his love as brave as he, to guide themselves in a starless sea only by sirensong, only by faith? "I fall into the flowers, into the lavenders, and I feel the kiss of your stars against my own," he breathed, and swallowed the laughter of excitement, of understanding. Perhaps his siren did sing only for him. "This sky that belongs only to me, this garden of something wilder than I. I have seen these flowers before, curled against windowsills, the bouquets of noble girls as they run their merry way. I look up to the sky and I breathe in the heather-sweet air. This ocean of flowers that I call so sweetly mine."

"Bury me here among the flowers, where flesh decays and cools and becomes one with the colours. Bury me here under the endless sky of blue, where the shooting stars cry for us both. Where the world could love us, where I could love this sorrowful world." His every word was a reverence, his eyes focused on the lyrics, his heart beginning to beat a melody usually reserved only for the highlands, where the sky met the sea.

"There is nothing else here but shadows and colours, silence and me. Nothing but I and the ghost of your grace. I have never broken that silence here, and may this dream be forever mine, upon my heart and within my hands, wrapped tight around my finger and holding me close. May it become the reality one day that forms firm around me, the way the world wakes up in the presence of a king it hasn't forgotten."

"Let me fall," Albafica had wrote, "Between the Anne's-lace and the love-lies-bleeding, where the lavenders tell me where I am. Let the dream be real at long last. Let me come home."

Minos fell back onto his spine, eyes towards the air, laughing. Laughing. He knew the course they were on, had never sailed it, had heard tell of the sailors brave enough to take it, of those whose tides had cast them onto it without ever asking them. A course he had never understood how to take until he had asked.

If he wept, he didn't notice. He only laughed, until his joy allowed him the time to rise, to gather Albafica's tapestry, to think of where he might hang it. Such a work of art had to be displayed properly. On his way, he noticed that the roses had a challenger to their claim upon the marble pillars of his home: a small, white-stemmed flower, almost in bushes like hydrangeas, its blue-stained petals long and thin and numerous. He smiled. They rarely grew outside Elysium, and never in the ground world.

He had pinned swatches of those flowers to the lapel of the moon, when the course set out for him held waves larger than any ship, when the storm would not subside. He had done the same for his brothers, when he feared their drowning. Albafica had never known their existence. He wondered, then, where Sir Lugonis – and may he live on, in ballad and in bone – had learned of them.

They meant survival, they meant resurrection, they meant wayfinding backward. They looked so much like forget-me-nots, if their meaning were not turned upon its head, if one had never seen them before. They meant one thing only: ' _come back to me_ '.

He opened the door to his chambers with his shoulder, studying the walls for the best place to hang the tapestry, the map of the course they were about to take. The banner that had occupied the north wall had been pulled away, held to the corner by the white-thorned blossoms that had grown seemingly within the hour.

The Meikai approved, and it had never been so plain. The threads at his fingertips reached up to hang the tapestry upon the wall, and to make room, he did not need to prune back a single albafica blossom.


End file.
